Facilitating agent development in open distributed systems

One of the main reasons behind the success of the Web is that many “regular users” are able to create Web pages that, using hyperlinks, incrementally extend both the size and the complexity of the Web itself. The development of agents in the Web infrastructure should ideally be driven by the same paradigm: users being able to write simple or advanced agents. These agents will then provide capabilities using a set of resources, such as standard Web pages, Web services and, of course, other agents. However, agents providing advanced services will never be developed in the same way as Web pages have been created in the past. In fact programming agents is a complex task that needs adequate skills and tools in order to be carried out successfully. As a consequence, only few people are currently able to contribute to their development. The question that arises is whether this gap could be possibly reduced in the future. In this paper we address this question presenting NOWHERE, an open agent communication infrastructure which facilitates the programming task in open distributed multi-agent systems.